G-Data AntiVirus 2011

G-Data AntiVirus 2011 ($US30 for a single-PC, one-year license as of 11/23/2010) placed fourth -- albeit a close fourth -- in our roundup of 2011 antivirus products. G-Data continues its recent trend of strong malware detection, blocking, and removal in 2011, and couples it with a good interface.

G-Data AntiVirus is generally easy to use. Its installation process took a few more steps than I would have liked, but it was reasonably straightforward. The main interface clearly indicates your PC's protection status, though it does lack a "master" everything's-protected-and configured-correctly status indicator that's present in many antivirus products. The scan screen isn't as simple as it is in some other products, but is still well laid out. G-Data is a German import, and I found that some of the language in alerts and other parts of the interface may not have been translated as well as it could have been.

Despite these minor issues with its interface, G-Data has muscle where it counts most: stopping malware. It detected 99.4 percent of malware samples in tests that scan for known malware -- the second best score in this test. And it had a good showing in tests for blocking brand-new malware: G-Data completely blocked 84 percent of such malware in AV-Test's "real-world" detection tests -- an above-average, but not quite a top-notch, score. It partially blocked an additional 4 percent of attacks.

What if malware does make it onto your PC? G-Data was one of the better performers at cleaning up malware: it detected all infections on our test PC, and disinfected active malware components in 80 percent of the cases, which tied it with several other products for the top score in this test. And it removed all traces of malware infections 60 percent of the time -- again, a very good showing.

In addition, G-Data AntiVirus was one of the few antivirus packages we tested that didn't flag a single "safe" file as potentially dangerous.

Scan speed results were mixed. G-Data performed well in the on-demand scan tests, which determine how quickly it can run a manually initiated scan. It completed the on-demand scan of 4.5GB of data in 1 minute, 51 seconds -- the third-best score in this test. On the other hand, its on-access scan times lagged. (The on-access test is a good way to see how long it will take a product to scan files as they're opened or saved to disk.) It finished this test -- scanning 4.5GB of files -- in 5 minutes, 36 seconds, a below-average showing.

G-Data AntiVirus had a moderate impact on overall PC performance. It added less than a second to startup time versus a PC with no antivirus software installed -- a negligible difference. In most other tests, its impact on performance was slightly lower than average relative to other antivirus software we tested.

Although it has some minor issues, G-Data AntiVirus 2011 is a very strong package overall, and is worthy of your consideration.

PCW Evaluation Team

I would recommend this device for families and small businesses who want one safe place to store all their important digital content and a way to easily share it with friends, family, business partners, or customers.

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